to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. I have, said he, often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun” (Farrand 1911, 648). Franklin’s witty remark had style, but he did not, with his analogy, thereby create an artwork. The presence of a metaphor and the demand for interpretation are insufficient to draw the demarcation line between art and not-art. Danto knew this by delivering necessary but not sufficient conditions for something to be art.
Danto loved Chardin. Proust wrote that Chardin “brings together objects and people in these rooms that are more than an object, and even than a person, perhaps, being the scene of their existence” (Proust 1895, 20). Diderot wrote about Chardin’s “handling” as “so magic.” Danto saw “acts of transfiguration … of the commonplace. Transfiguration is not much of an improvement on magic,” he explained, “but at least it gives us a model: Christ appears to his disciples as transfigured.” But then he insisted that the religious analogy would not lead us to understand “how by means of paint and varnish” Chardin achieved his “miracle” (Danto 2005, 37).
A painting by Chardin, “Still life with plums” (ca 1730),2 says all it has to say with forms and shades, and with brushstrokes. We see the brushstrokes as some plums, the one closest to the viewer perhaps overripe and about to split open, a half-empty bottle of red wine, a simple glass with water and two baguettes. The bottle and a baguette are partly seen through the clear glass and water. All rests on a thick, wooden, humble table. The brushstrokes are not just brushstrokes: they are more to make the bottle of wine, the plums, the glass, the bread, and the worn-out table. The scene expresses a certain mood. Common objects are transfigured by the artist’s gaze. We see an entire way of life. Here is the “magic,” how he creates the feeling of being at home in this world, a feeling of love in the way he looks at these things.
If the “I” is not another object of the world, but rather a point of view, and artworks show “the world as given” by the “I” of the artist, then through artworks the “you” of the spectator, listener, or reader undergoes a transfiguration and becomes, up to a point, the artist’s “I.” For Danto, “the greatest metaphors of art” are those in which “the spectator identifies himself” with the character. Reading Anna Karenina, I see myself as Anna and “to see oneself as Anna is in some way to be Anna.” To see “one’s life as her life” is an experience that changes one’s life (Danto 1981, 172–173). It is not enough for me to look at the world alone from my window. Great works of art reveal aspects of the world that enlarge my own perspective. Chardin’s vision changes my perspective.
The revelation of Chardin’s artwork springs from those brushstrokes. Thanks to this partial and momentary metamorphosis, I see the plums and, partly through glass and water, the fat and half empty bottle of red wine and the baguettes from Chardin’s first-person point of view. For that to happen, personal style is a must. In this particular painting, you look at the brushwork and you see traces of the movement of Chardin’ hand. The pulse and touch of the dead artist’s hand is still there, present and immediate.
Danto’s deep criticism of R.B. Kitaj in this context is telling. The meaning is not incarnated in the paintings themselves; Kitaj wanted for us to be guided by the autobiographical “prefaces” that accompanied his works. His “Self-Portrait as a Woman” (1978) shows a woman naked outdoors and we are expected to see her as a portrait of the artist. To see this you must read the title and the catalogue texts, because “typically … the paintings are assigned meanings without anything happening to the painting as viewed” (Danto 2000a, 130). Contrary to Chardin’s work, what the painting is about was not fully painted. Kitaj’s painting is an artwork, but it is powerless.
Hegel claims that in a work of art “meaning” and “appearance” ought to be “penetrated by one another” (Hegel 1835, 93). He believes that aesthetic judgments are about “the appropriateness or inappropriateness” of “content” and “means of presentation” (Hegel 1835, 11). This is largely Danto’s approach – the aesthetic failure of Kitaj’s “Self-Portrait as a Woman” is precisely a consequence of the lack of connection between the meaning and its material embodiment. A work of art ought to be “a piece of visual thought” (Danto 2013b, 165). “Prefaces,” external words, don’t do the job painting is supposed to do. When explanations are more interesting than the artwork itself, the artwork fails.
Consider Danto’s comments on a painting by Rothko. Given its abstraction, simplicity, and absolute dependence on the nuances of pigments, it is extremely difficult to translate the artwork into words. That is a good thing. “The rectangles, in ‘Untitled’ (1960) share no boundaries. … So what does being close to them reveal? The amazing edges of the rectangles, and the way underlayers of paint reach through the rectangles to give a sense of translucency. These forms are not pure red and pure black, as they appear from afar. The extraordinary beauty is due to the way the edges of the forms appear to penetrate and to be penetrated by the ground color of the paintings; and to the way the undercolors flicker through the surface colors. These animate the forms as well as the colors through irregular pulsations of light” (Danto 2000b, 341). Rothko thinks with his colors. As opposed to Kitaj’s “Self-portrait as a woman,” where the meaning has not been integrated with its brushwork and remains external to it, Rothko’s thinking appears in and through his painting of colors and forms. And what about the meaning? Does this painting have one? “Beauty,” simply, so claims Danto, is “the meaning of Rothko’s work” (Danto 2000b, 342).
We do make aesthetic judgments and expect others to share our point of view. We comment on a film’s poignant dialogues, the elegant design of a chair or a fork, the nostalgic sadness of a nocturne, the balance of a building’s façade, the magnificence of the sea as it rises and explodes into foam against a rock, and so forth. When we express these judgments we invite someone else to share in our experience. Aesthetic judgment transfers an aesthetic experience. Yet are the judgments ever final? Being drawn from interpretation, do they ever exhaust an artwork’s meaning? Often what comes after gives a different value to works that were produced before: impressionism changes the way in which Velázquez’s paintings are seen, Picasso makes us see African masks from a new outlook. Danto suggests that artworks are like events in how they “derive their importance from what they led to.” Nevertheless, his interpretation of artworks remains tethered to the artist’s intentions, restricting, in my view, the scope and potential meaning of artworks (Danto 1986, 44, 1997, 75; 2013a, 15 and ff; 2013c, 386–387).
Hegel wrote that an artwork is “essentially a question, an address to the responsive breast, a call to the mind” (Hegel 1835, 71). One could say that style similarly is a sort of address, an invitation to another person. Good writing summons the reader to experience the text in a certain way. Danto’s own style was an invitation, almost intimate, to engage his enticing and entertaining way of thinking. There is something contagious about it. In reading Danto, his voice continues to resonate. His writing creates the impression that he is speaking and simply registering his thoughts and imaginings as they come. “He allows his prose to wander and invites the reader to wander with it,” observed Christopher Sartwell (Sartwell 2013, 711). Often, in the midst of rigorous conceptual analysis, he introduces amusing and telling fictional characters. “Testadura,” is a favored example, “a plain speaker and noted philistine,” who could only see Rauschenberg’s “Bed” as a real and dirty bed, or the drips of paint given to plain sight.
When Danto addressed abstract expressionism, he talked about the paintings themselves, but he also captured a certain Tenth Avenue atmosphere of the times. He wrote of a canvas itself describing
a rotation through ninety degrees from its vertical position on the easel to its horizontal position on the floor, which the painter crouches over like a frog-god. But the drip is also evidence for the urgency of the painting act, of pure speed and passion, as the artist swings loops
